Comatose
by cherik-mcbender
Summary: Erik sneaks into the hospital to visit Charles after Cuba, not realizing that Charles had slipped into a coma.


**Prompt:**_ Could you write about Charles in a coma after Cuba and Erik visiting him?_

Erik came in the middle of the night, when he was certain no one else was around, exactly one week after Cuba. After three days of silent rumination, anger, and confusion, Erik had called Hank. Only Hank and Raven had known about Charles and Erik's relationship, and he knew Raven would probably never speak to him again – so Hank was his one shot. He called him and called him, left fourteen voicemails, each one consecutively more desperate as he realized just how big his mistake had been. Finally, four days later, Hank had texted him nothing more than the name of the hospital and this: _"Don't let anyone see you."_

So he came in the middle of the night, dressed completely in black, the helmet placed firmly on his head, marching silently through the halls until he reached the room. It wasn't until his hand was on the doorknob that he began to wonder what he would say to Charles. How could he apologize? Should he? He had been right, hadn't he? Or had he? If what he had done had gotten Charles hurt, how could he have been right in doing it? He shook his head and pushed the door open.

What he saw wasn't Charles. That man – that thing – hooked up to all those machines…there was no way that could be his Charles. He strode over to the bed and tapped the person's shoulder. "Charles?" he asked softly. There was a chair a few feet away from the bedside; he flicked his hand and moved the chair to him, sitting on its edge and leaning in to the warm body in the bed.

That was when he knew. Because the smell hit him – buried underneath the smell of sterile machinery, of blood and sweat, there was the smell of Charles, the smell he used to wake up to every morning.

Erik leaned back, choking on his breath, ripping off his helmet. The man was lying absolutely still. One side of his head was shaved, with ugly red stitches shining in the dull florescent lighting. The rest of his hair was caked with dirt. His slightly rounded cheeks were bloodless, pale under the slight freckles. His eyes were shut, his eyelids almost translucent. His lips were a sickly shade of blue. And poking out from between them, a long tube. Erik followed it with his eyes until he watched it disappear into a huge machine that was making a steady clicking noise. And then he realized that the clicking matched up with Charles' breathing, that Charles wasn't breathing – the machine was breathing for him.

"No," Erik rasped. His breath started to quicken, his heart racing as though it were trying to make up for the slow beat that Charles' couldn't sustain on its own. "No." He got up so quickly that the knocked the chair over, the bang of metal hitting tile resonating throughout the room. Charles' body didn't flinch at all.

Erik swept over to the foot of the bed, grabbing for the chart hanging there. "_C. Xavier. Age 30. Comatose due to intracerebral hemorrhaging._"

"No," Erik repeated. "No. No no no no." His eyes began to cloud over as he staggered back to Charles' bedside. Charles' screams kept echoing in his head, bouncing ceaselessly back and forth as though they wanted to makehis brain bleed, too.

His vision blurred, and through the flashes of color, he watched the practically-lifeless form in the bed sit up and slur, his words mutated by the tube, "You…you did…this…." – before dropping back into the bed, the clicking of the machines, the steady beeping, growing louder in Erik's head – until he couldn't bear it anymore, until it was all he could do to keep from passing out, until he dropped to his knees, tearing at his hair, until he too was screaming, trying to block out the screams he heard in his head.

It was dark after that; everything was foggy. He remembered Hank coming in, yelling at him to shut up, that if he was going to do this, he shouldn't have come at all…and then sinking to his knees beside Erik, wrapping his arm around him, doing anything he could to quiet the yells that kept tearing themselves from Erik's throat. He remembered grabbing Hank's collar, begging him to wake Charles up, to kill _him_ instead, to do something. Something. He remembered Hank shaking his head as another doctor came in and dragged him to his feet. He remembered lashing out at the doctor, screaming at her to leave him alone, to let him stay with Charles. And he remembered security coming in. He remembered a sharp jolt in his side, and then…blackness.

He woke up in a cot in an otherwise empty room with a guard standing by the door. He rolled over, closed his eyes, and prayed that, once he fell asleep, he would never wake up again.


End file.
